New Line Cinema
When Hollywood finds a winning formula, you can guarantee studios will squeeze every last drop out of it for more success. That was certainly the case in 1984, when director Joe Dante introduced the world to “Gremlins,” those chaos-fueled and fiendishly hungry little horrors that ruined Christmas. After that adorable little mogwai, Gizmo, got fed after midnight, loads of other movies tried to grab the table scraps of his success, like “Ghoulies”.
One film that got caught on the conveyor belt of copycats, however, was purely coincidental according to the director. “Critters” was directed and co-written by Stephen Herek and starred a young Scott Grimes, who would go on to appear in “Band of Brothers”, one of the best bingeworthy miniseries on Max, “ER,” and a Hulu sci-fi comedy with a loyal fanbase, “The Orville”. Something of a cult classic after its release, “Critters” swapped mystical, cute monsters for escaped alien prisoners from outer space who crash-land near the Brown family farmhouse in Kansas.
These red-eyed little creatures, known as Crites, grow the more they eat — and they eat absolutely everything. While the munching menaces share a taste for carnage and chaos with Dante’s batch, what sets them apart is how much more bloodthirsty they are. Gremlins might chew through your wiring and clear out your kitchen cupboards, but if a Critter gets on your premises, it’ll simply chew your face off.
Critters were scarier than Gremlins
New Line Cinema
There’s no doubt that Dante’s Christmas monster movie had drizzles of tension and mild terror, but Herek’s little horror show in Kansas has a lot more bite. While they might not look as ferocious now as they did back then, the Crites, with their glowing red eyes and rows of sharp teeth, chow down on police officers and eat a young Billy Zane, who makes an appearance in one of the earliest roles of his career.
Even the head of the household, Jay Brown (Billy Green Bush), has chunks taken out of him while his wife, Helen Brown (Dee Wallace, who’d already dealt with aliens in “E.T.” — the Spielberg classic that was banned in Scandinavia), is poisoned by barbs that the Crites shoot from their backs like interplanetary porcupines. The film earned nowhere near the level of critical acclaim as “Gremlins” (52% Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes against the latter’s 86%), but “Critters” achieved modest success at the box office.
Drawing in $13.2 million against a budget of only $2 million, the movie was deemed sufficiently successful to become a franchise, leading to four film sequels (one of which features Leonardo DiCaprio in an early role) and a revival television series on Shudder in 2019 titled “Critters: A New Binge”. Even with such an impressive lifespan, though, “Critters” couldn’t escape the shadow of the creature feature that came before it, as much as those behind the film tried to refute claims that it was just another “Gremlins” knock-off.
Critters’ limited success was a product of poor timing
New Line Cinema
In the years after “Gremlins,” theaters were overrun by anything that could crawl, roll, or bite ankles in horrific fashion. Killer tomatoes, trolls, and Garbage Pail Kids were trying to replicate the success of Dante’s movie. According to the producer of “Critters”, Rupert Harvey, however, it was purely a coincidence. “I don’t think I saw Gremlins until we were in post-production,” Harvey explained to Den of Geek in 2021. “It was certainly not something we were thinking about very much at the time, if at all.”
Harvey understood the competition he faced when the movie finally came out, but remained unfazed. “We were dealing with very different creatures, and the fact that they were so different in concept meant I wasn’t terribly bothered by it.” As for those who made comparisons, Harvey highlighted that “Critters” was a much tougher beast. “People who say there are similarities are just influenced by the fact Gremlins was such a huge success, but it was a much bigger budget movie.”
Since the last kerfuffle with the Crites back in 2019, there’s been no mention of getting another attack from the Critters. That’s a shame, considering that the Gremlins are coming back to our screens with a new movie scheduled for 2027. Who knows? With those scaly little nuisances set to return, maybe the Critters could roll back into action too.
